On Form Blog

Flexible Dieting For Sustainability

Here at On Form Fitness, we believe in making your life easy. Gone are the days of fad diets, ridiculously low-calorie nutrition regimes and poor advice that delivers only short-term results. That’s where we step in and highlight ‘flexible dieting’.

What Is Flexible Dieting?

Your maintenance calories are the number of calories that you need every single day for your body to function. If you eat this amount of calories you will not drop or gain weight.

The way the diet side of this works is by getting you to eat around 500kcal less than your maintenance calories per day. The body still needs the maintenance calories we discussed earlier, so it now has to find them. Your body will find these calories in your fat stores.

So as long as you get Maintenance – 500 kcal in per day and your macros are on track, the rest is up to you. If you have a few hundred calories left over, have the chocolate bar you’ve been craving – that little bit of flexibility makes the diet more sustainable.

Now we don’t recommend you ignore the importance of nutrients and health, our body needs vegetables for fibre, water for so many reasons and a good balance of iron etc.

How To Balance Your Flexible Diet

The first step is to know your maintenance calorie requirement – this is something we calculate for our clients based on lifestyle and activity levels.

Let’s say, just as an example, your maintenance calories are 2000. You’ll need to eat 1500kcal per day in order to lose 1lb of fat per week.

The only other rule is that you get your macronutrients on track. A good rule for this is 40% protein, 40% carbs, and 20% fat. So if your maintenance calories are 2000, that’ll be 200g or protein and carbs and 45g of fat.

The way this regime works is it allows you to have treats but stay on track and get your results.